Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic for today is about why you must strike from above in your piano playing. However, this is not always the case. I’m referring to a very specific technique. In fact, striking from above can create a harsh, unpleasant sound in some circumstances.

When playing large chords, striking from above can sound brash.

When you strike from above using the arms, you have no control and end up with a crass sound. Instead, what you want to do is strike from the surface of the keys and drop the weight of your arms all at once. By doing so, you will achieve a gorgeous sound that will not be harsh no matter how hard you play.

Should you strike from above when doing finger work?

For slow practice, raised fingers can be a good way to delineate which fingers are up and down, so you get clean releases of notes. This is useful when practicing scales and arpeggios. However, when playing more quickly, you must stay right on top of the keys without raised fingers or you’ll never gain the speed. But to practice the release of notes, practicing with delineated fingers down with other fingers up and out of the way is a terrific exercise, akin to stretching before working out, as I’ve discussed before.

The real place where striking from above is vitally important is with staccato!

When practicing slowly, you might be tempted to play with your fingers close to the keys. The problem with this is that you won’t get the crisp staccato you’re aiming for. Playing faster using that technique will produce a muddy sound. Striking from above gives you a crisp staccato sound. So, you must strike from above in your slow practice to prepare yourself to play quickly and achieve precision and power in your staccatos.

It’s the wrist that is doing all the work.

Make sure you don’t let your fingers go down to notes before you play them. You want to strike from above in one smooth motion using your wrist. That way, you get the clarity of the staccato and the power from the wrist. Another thing to avoid is using the arms for the up and down motion. The arms are too big and heavy, which will result in a clumsy sound. You won’t get the crisp sound you desire. The arms are too slow, and it just bogs down. You should move the arms side to side to get over the right keys, but there should be no up and down motion.

You can achieve a light staccato with the wrist as well.

By utilizing the wrist staying closer to the keys, you can get a light, fast staccato as well. So remember: for more power, use more motion, and for light, crisp staccato, use smaller wrist motion. But always use the wrists when trying to achieve a short, crisp sound.

So that’s the tip for the day!

Remember to strike from above in your staccato, and you will be rewarded with a crisp sound. Doing this, you can achieve speed, fluency, power, and lightness. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how faster isn’t always louder. It may seem obvious that playing faster does not mean playing louder. But you would be surprised at how much of the time when you see a crescendo, you naturally speed up! This can be detrimental to your playing for so many reasons. Let me give you an example from Clementi’s Sonatina in C major Opus 36 no 1. In the second line of the piece, there’s a crescendo. Many pianists struggle with this passage because they tend to speed up during the crescendo, making it even more challenging to play. So, how can you mitigate this problem?

Always trust the metronome.

Work with a metronome to ensure that you maintain a steady tempo throughout the piece. You may find that as soon as you get to the crescendo, the metronome seems to be dragging. Well, drag along with it! The metronome is king. By following the metronome, you will be able to play with more security. When performing the piece, it’s natural to feel a bit excited, which can cause you to speed up during crescendos. To counteract this, you can intentionally slow down slightly when you find yourself playing faster. However, you must also check your work with a metronome to make sure you’re not overcompensating and slowing down too much.

Sometimes, getting faster during crescendos can be called for.

This is especially true in 19th-century music where rubato is used to create a sense of ebb and flow. Sometimes it can actually work, so long as then the pendulum swings the other way as it gets softer. Rubato can be effective in that respect. However, you must be careful not to lose or gain time on the beat. Practicing with a metronome is essential for ensuring that you stay on track.

Fingering is of vital importance.

Good fingering is fundamental. One of the best ways to discover good fingering is by playing in chords. By playing in chords, your fingers naturally fall on the right keys. You will know what fingering is going to be most effective by working in groups of notes played together in chords whenever possible in your music. It also gives you an opportunity to understand the harmonic underpinnings of your music. You can practice in different rhythms, accents, or in groups of notes. Each of these techniques will help you to assimilate your music. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about how to take your musical phrases further. One of the biggest challenges when playing lyrical music is controlling the ends of phrases to achieve a nice diminuendo, such as in the second movement of Clementi’s Sonatina in C major Opus 36, no. 1.

I like to play simple, effective trills that can be negotiated easily.

You don’t have to be distracted by highly ornamented trills. It’s not necessary to get the beauty of this music. Trills are left up to you. If you want to play more notes, go ahead. But don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on playing fast trills. Instead, concentrate on the beauty of the music and creating a singing line. Of course, the challenge of this movement, like so much other music, is twofold. You want to have melody above accompaniment throughout, and you also want to have the rise and fall of each phrase.

The secret to being able to control phrase endings to make them quiet is to peak later in your music.

Remember to start softly so you can grow in the middle of the phrase. You can keep growing further than the middle of the phrase. If you peak in the middle, instead of later in the phrase, it is very difficult to end the phrase quietly. Not only is it hard to control, but it also loses intensity and support. It sounds like a singer who doesn’t have enough air at the end of a phrase. Once again, it’s all about utilizing arm weight. You can look at some of my previous videos to understand what I’m talking about.

You can give the music more life by supporting the phrase further than the middle.

When you do this, the phrase endings have a nice taper. You won’t struggle to end the phrase without notes dropping out. Peak your phrases later so that the phrase endings can be beautifully controlled. You can make life so much easier for yourself while creating a longer musical line that projects all the way to the end of the phrase. You won’t have to worry about notes dropping out. So that’s the tip for today! I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about living in the comfort zone in your piano playing. Have you ever had a fast piece that you’re struggling to play fast? You have tension, but you want a beautiful, relaxed quality to your playing. You want to play with fluidity. You might wonder how to achieve this. If you keep struggling to play just a little bit faster than you are able to play with comfort and relaxation, you’ll never be able to achieve that kind of relaxed fluidity in your playing.

The secret is slow practice.

Find the speed at which you can play completely relaxed. It might surprise you how slowly you have to go in order to achieve that. The metronome is such an invaluable tool! Finding the speed at which you can play in a relaxed manner is the first step. You should have the score in front of you when you’re doing this kind of work. You may find that when you slow things down, you will realize you don’t know it as well as you thought you did. That’s why having the score in front of you and setting a metronome at a speed you can play your piece with absolute solidity is a great way to live in that comfort zone. Once you can play it at a slow tempo with total relaxation and accuracy, then you finally have the capability of speeding up your performance.

Slow practice is invaluable, but sometimes it’s hard to translate that slow playing to performance speed.

Another thing you can do is take small note groups and use extreme repetition to solidify the small section. You can take even just one or two notes! Keep playing them until you can play with complete relaxation. Then add other tiny note groups in the same relaxed manner. You can continue working this way through a passage or section of music.

These are two ways of approaching relaxation. Remember to go slowly enough that you can play with complete relaxation. Have the score in front of you so you can check your work. You’ll be surprised to learn what you know, and more importantly, what needs clarification in your playing. You can either play very slowly or you can take very small groups of notes and piece them together.

You’re working on two fronts!

One is to get a feel for what it’s going to be like when it’s up to tempo, even if you’re just playing small groups of notes that you string together. And the other one is to play at a slow tempo with complete security and relaxation. You live at that slow tempo! Live in the slow zone, in the comfort zone, and you’ll be rewarded with relaxation in your playing when you finally get things up to speed. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. Amazingly, there are hundreds of free pianos available all over the country. You can check out the links in the description below. But there’s so much more than that! What about free piano lessons? There are so many resources online, it’s unbelievable! You can check out what we have for you right here on LivingPianosVideos

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I was fortunate to grow up in a musical family. I also got to study with so many great pianists! So I enjoy sharing my passion for the piano.

I started teaching the piano while still in high school assisting my father with his teaching as my sister did before me. I got into selling pianos after graduating from music conservatory. Many people who contacted me for piano lessons didn’t have pianos! So I made it my business to find good used pianos which I had my piano technician put into good shape for them. There was such a demand for this sort of thing, and because of my extensive experience with pianos, people have relied upon me to help them with pianos ever since!

Teaching has been a continuum in my career which has many facets, from performing, to recording, as well as writing articles and making videos. So you can consider me your personal resource for information about pianos and piano lessons. Just email Robert@LivingPianos.com for a personalized response to help you! Thanks for joining me here at LivingPianos.com – Your Online Piano Resource!

LINKS:

Piano Adoption

Piano Lessons – How to Play Piano

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My Teachers:

John Ogdon

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As a bonus tip, we will discuss the use of the una corda, or soft pedal on a grand piano which is the
pedal on the left. Una corda means, “one string” because in early pianos, there were 2 strings on each
note. Depressing the pedal shifted the hammers so that the hammers only struck one string on each
note. Modern pianos have 3 strings on each note in most registers. The hammers still hit all the strings,
but not directly. This results in a softer initial attack. Yet the sustain is just as rich because of sympathetic
vibrations. By combining this pedal technique with the use of the arm, as well as the other techniques I
described earlier, you can overcome the inherent limitation of the piano’s sonic characteristics.
In conclusion, the single greatest challenge in piano playing is the envelope of the sound produced by
the piano. However, by mastering the art of illusion, and combining techniques such as using the weight
of the arm and using your fingers to hold notes (phantom pedal), you can overcome this limitation and
create a beautiful, sustained sound. This is the secret of artistry in piano playing.
I hope this has been helpful for you! Leave your comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube!
Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon
channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons or want more information about pianos. I have many
resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Is pedal necessary in playing Bach? That’s a question I received from a viewer. Most of you probably know that the piano wasn’t invented during Bach’s lifetime. However, Bach did try the very earliest incarnation of what was ostensibly a piano. But he never wrote any music specifically for the piano.

Bach’s favorite keyboard instrument was the clavichord, because of how expressively it could play.

Because there wasn’t an escapement on the clavichord, you could actually impart vibrato on notes after you played them! Of course, the piano has escapement. That means the hammers escape the strings after striking them. This allows for a wide range of dynamics. But the sustain pedal didn’t exist during Bach’s lifetime.

What I’m going to do today is a really interesting experiment!

I’m counting on you to help me with this! I’m going to play the first section of the Bach French Suite No. 5. The first movement has a repeat. The first time I’m going to play it with no pedal at all. Then I’m going to play it with lots of pedal. But I’m going to be using little tiny bursts of pedal, just to enhance the tone. The questions are, can you hear the difference? And do you have a preference? Watch the video, then let me know your impression in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube.

Watch the video to take part in the experiment!

So I’ve shown you two examples of the same exact section. You probably wonder what I was doing with my foot there, fluttering up and down so quickly. Well, in this piece, as in so much Bach, there’s so much counterpoint going on that it’s difficult to really use much pedal. If you’re playing Chopin, for example, there is obviously so much you can do with pedaling. In fact, you need to use the pedal! If I were to play, for example, the Chopin G minor Ballade without the pedal, it would sound pretty thin. In music like that, the sustain pedal is absolutely essential to hold out notes for harmonies to blend together. But the music of Bach wasn’t written with the sustain or damper pedal in mind. So it works just fine without the pedal.

Why would you want to use pedal in Bach?

In Bach, you use short bursts of pedal to enhance longer notes to make them sustain longer. Because, as you know, when you play a note on the piano, it’s always dying away. As pianists, we’re always fighting that. We are trying to create a singing sustained line for the illusion of continuity, like in the human voice or the bow of a violin. The pedal helps to enrich the sound of key notes so that you get a sense of the line. Why just little flutters of pedal? Because to do any kind of substantial pedaling where the pedal stays down for any length of time, would blur the counterpoint together. And that’s not what you want. I’m really interested in reading your comments on this! Which way do you like better? Could you hear a difference at all? Let me know! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how slowly the Moonlight Sonata should be played. I’m referring to the famous first movement that so many people love to play. There are some questions as to how slowly it should go. After all, it is written to be played Adagio Sostenuto, which is slow and sustained. More than that, it goes on to say “Si deve suonare tutto questo pezzo delicatissimamente e senza sordini.” Now that’s a mouthful! That translates literally to, “The whole piece must be played very delicately and without deafness.” Sordini, we know, means mute, so, without the mute. And what is the mute on the piano? Well, perhaps he was talking about the soft pedal.

Why wouldn’t you want to use the soft pedal in the Moonlight Sonata?

Well, you have to remember that the instrument that Beethoven wrote this piece for is drastically different from a modern piano. In fact, pianos early in Beethoven’s life are quite different from what pianos had become later in his life. He worked closely with instrument builders to develop the piano. My guess is that on the instrument he wrote the Moonlight Sonata, the tone was not sufficient with the soft pedal. I do like to use the soft pedal in the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

The Moonlight Sonata is not in 4/4 time.

I was teaching a student the Moonlight Sonata the other day. They were playing at a very slow tempo. I took exception with it. Why? Because in an urtext edition of the score, this piece isn’t in 4/4 time. Look carefully and you will realize it’s in cut time, 2/2 or alla breve. The symbol looks like a C with a vertical line through it. So instead of having four quarter notes getting the beat, you have two half notes getting the beat. Playing faster sounds slower when the pulse is a longer note value. Beethoven intended it to be played with the half note as the slow beat, instead of the quarter note which makes you play it slower. If you try to slow down that quarter note, the whole piece bogs down. It’s a fairly long movement as it is. To play it with a quarter note ticking makes it ponderous. It’s not the way Beethoven intended the piece to be played.

Check out your score and see if you have the cut time!

If your edition is in 4/4 common time, that is not correct. The authoritative urtext editions are written in 2/2 time, not 4/4 time. So you may want to think about your tempo of the Moonlight Sonata. I hope this has been helpful for you! Leave your comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com